Revision as of 15:41, 3 January 2007

November 6 , 2006

Benedikt Boehm hollow@gentoo.org

Linux-VServer Project Announces New Development Release

Today, the Linux-VServer project announced the second release for the development series of its kernel patch including a per-CPU fair/hard scheduling, full JFS and OCFS2 filesystem support, improved limit and accounting system, improved privacy features and much more.

About The Next Development Release: 2.1.1

After one year of work the Linux-VServer project released the second version of the development kernel patch series including the following features and bugfixes:

Additions

Per CPU Fair/Hard Scheduler

Per Context System Time

Dentry Accounting and Limits

Lock Accounting and Limits

Slab and Page Fault Accounting

Context Privacy (Admin)

Context Locking (reactivated)

Context Capability Masking

Full JFS Filesystem Support

Full OCFS2 Filesystem Support

Enhancements

CoW Link Breaking (chmod/chown)

Fake Init and Proc Checks

Socket Accounting

Syscall Command Security

Context Helper

Persistent Contexts

Memory/Swap/Cache Info Virtualization

PID Virtualization for External Code

Scheduling Monitor

Runtime History Tracing

Barrier and Trace Checks/Info

Improved UTS Virtualization

Improved Trap Information

IRQ Context (Un)Tagging

Removals

About Linux-VServer

Linux-VServer provides virtualization for GNU/Linux systems. Virtualization is a framework or methodology of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. This is accomplished by kernel level isolation. It allows to run multiple virtual units at once. Those units are sufficiently isolated to guarantee the required security, but utilize available resources efficiently, as they run on the same kernel.

The basic concept of the Linux-VServer solution is to separate the user-space environment into distinct units (sometimes called Virtual Private Servers) in such a way that each VPS looks and feels like a real server to the processes contained within.

Although different Linux distributions use (sometimes heavily) patched kernels to provide special support for unusual hardware or extra functionality, most Linux distributions are not tied to a special kernel.

Linux-VServer uses this fact to allow several distributions, to be run simultaneously on a single, shared kernel, without direct access to the hardware, and share the resources in a very efficient way.